Limited Government Is

The Right to Bear Arms Apparently Extends to Chicago

American Thinker

Clarice Feldman

David Savage, reporting for the Los Angeles Times, believes the Supreme Court signaled today that it would extend the Second Amendment’s Right to Bear Arms to the states through the Due Process (Fourteenth Amendment) and overturn a city wide ban on gun possession:

The case forced the high court to confront a simple question it had never answered: Did the 2nd Amendment limit only the federal government’s ability to regulate guns and state militias, or did it also give citizens a right to challenge state and local restrictions on guns?

All signs Tuesday were that five justices saw the right to “bear arms” as national in scope and not limited to laws passed in Washington.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy described the individual right to possess a gun as being of “fundamental character,” like the right to freedom of speech. “If it is not fundamental, then Heller is wrong,” Kennedy said, referring to the decision two years ago that struck down the handgun ban in the District of Columbia. Kennedy was part of the 5-4 majority in that case.

At the Volokh Conspiracy, Professor Orrin Kerr links to a transcript of the oral argument and provides a more detailed discussion of the argument and considerations the various judges and parties expressed in the oral argument.